Commute of the Walking Dead

Bunch of small stuff for you. First of all, I promised I would post info here about The Walking Dead "event" taking place tomorrow. The back end of season three begins on Sunday on AMC. Either you love this show or you don't (and even those who love it got pretty tired of season two which was described by one person as "a bunch of people arguing about living on a farm") but if you do like it you jones for each weekly instalment. So Wednesday between 2PM and 7PM there will be zombies at Union Station (more than usual) and they will be giving away T-shirts.

My column today in The National Post is about road tolls. I wrote it after Rex Murphy delivered a rant about tolls in Saturday's edition which echoed Jerry Agar's contention that motorists already pay more than their share for the roads. You can read the details in the column here but the cold hard fact is depending on where a driver lives in North America thay actually only pay between 30 and 50% of the cost of the roads they drive on. For comparison TTC users now pay between 75 and 80% of the cost of providing public transit. The funny thing about the TTC is that it turns a profit on the old City of Toronto but because you have to run night buses in the suburbs it ends up losing money. So the old complaint about obnoxious downtowners punishing the suburbs doesn't really hold up.

some great interviews today and two really lively roundtables. You can listen to the podcast here. And for those who aren't aware of the podcast, it's a daily package of everything from Double Double (5:47 with Andrew Carter), the Round Tables (7:47 and 8:47) and our favorite interviews. Most people can't listen to the whole show but if you like what we offer this is a package you can listen to later on in the day or over lunch or at the gym.

Talk tomorrow. On Doctor Doctor at 6:48 Dr. Mitch answers the question “does exposing a cancerous tumor to the air make it grow?”

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This has to be one of my favourite Right Wing issues. Basically everyone agrees we need a VASTLY improved transit system in all directions of the city and suburbs. How to pay for it is the arguement. Somehow the right thinks the private sector is going to pay, how much they never say, becuase they have no hard data. where the left says yea road tolls seem to be an option, to which the right looses its mind and say never, but they never offer a sold alternative which you can only conclude means they really don't care about transit because that's for poor people and well screw them.

How about asking the province for a special cut of the provincial gas tax, say half perrcent for every litre of gas sold in the GTA, no increase just a cut off the existing tax. Worth a try.

There are many solutions. Just google all the cities smaller and less dense than Toronto that have built hundreds of kilometers of subways in the last couple of decades. But I would focus on Singapore and to a lesser extent Hong Kong. Both have what we would call crown corporations traded on the stock market building and running the subway, like the right wingers love a business. And both make a profit. Singapore is geographicly and ideologyicly a very close fit to metro Toronto. Use Singapore as a template, now they take a holisitic approach combining public housing and commercial into the transit plans. Wow what a concept having a overall plan. In 1987 Singapore had zero subways, today it has 169KM Toronto has 68KM.